While we’re on the subject of making decisions, my good friend, and Informal Learning expert, Paul Matthews wrote about this story in his recent newsletter:
A man in Gandhi’s entourage was forever complaining about this, that, and the other. Finally, Gandhi said to him…
“If it is a peaceful and calm life you are seeking, I think it will be easier if you change yourself rather than seeking to change others. Which will you find easier; to protect your feet with slippers, or to carpet the whole earth?”
Well, it made me laugh out loud!!
How wise. How eloquently expressed. And how understated!
Bearing in mind we can’t think straight when, as my granddad would say, “You’ve got your monkey up!”, in other words, your inner chimp is misbehaving, I often advise clients to ‘step outside of themselves’ as though they’re an onlooker, whenever they feel stuck – in order to gain a new perspective, and one that’s hopefully a little more rational and logical, and a whole lot less emotional.
Paul shows us here, exactly how to benefit from a new perspective. I thoroughly recommend you decide (like what I did there?) to try using a different point of view a go and start seeing challenges from a new standpoint.
And as always, let me know how it goes.
Read my previous articles about your inner chimp
The Chimp Paradox
Did you know that neuroscientists have shown that people who have damaged the emotional part of their brain and therefore don’t know how they feel about things, simply cannot make decisions?
It turns out that to make a decision we have to know how we feel about that decision.
Who knew!!
When you improve your ability to recognise when your emotional chimp is hijacking you; hijacking your thoughts, your feelings and behaviour, you can begin to distinguish you from your chimp.
You need your emotions of course, but you don’t want them taking over.
You need to call the shots and let it know, in no uncertain terms, who’s the boss of you!
